Gadgetory

everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and we're reviewing am these new r9 380 x video card which ships and only one variety and that is four gigabytes so no 2 gigabyte 4 gigabyte stuff here it is only 4 gigabytes and the 380 x is priced about where you'd expect it it's above the 380 in the vertical landing at two hundred thirty dollars MSRP with several the board partners shipping their 380 X's pre overclocked at about 240 to 250 dollars so you've got a ten to twenty dollar price disparity in there depending on which aib you're looking at or add in board partner and the card has pretty familiar specs because it's still running the same architecture as found on the previous r9 300 series cards like the r9 380 still on Hawaii which was on the older 200 series cards as well at least some of them like the 290x and the specs overall are familiar so here's a specs chart that'll show some of those but the core items to look at are of course the engine clock also called the core clock stock the card ships at 970 megahertz but our model which is a sapphire nitro r9 380 x ships at 10 40 megahertz with a couple of other changes to the memory clock and things like that if we look at more of the stock specs you'll see that it is strictly 4 gigabytes as I mentioned and the 380 x has 2048 stream processors if you're curious for the 380 had you can see it in a chart next to the 380 x here and the three idx has a rated TDP of about 190 wats that we did our own internally validated GN official full power consumption test and have charged for that later on in this video there are 26 pin headers required for connection on the 380 x that we have of course with non reference designs or super overclocking cards they may add a pin or 2 48 + 6 pin normally for some of the overclocking cards and then the aib is that important partners are offering 380 x overclocked cards for about ten dollars more with the core clock at ten 40 ish megahertz in the case of ours and the memory at about 1500 megahertz versus the 14 25 megahertz gddr5 memory clock stock setting for the three ATX the rest of the specs as shown in the table are all pretty standard for a device of the r9 380 x is positioning within the vertical and you can check the charts on the website or some of them in this video for comparison against the existing 389 x video cards and e is clearly targeting nvidia's gtx 960 here as its primary competition go head-to-head with and that would include the primary model the 4 gigabyte gtx 960 priced at almost the same as the 380 x about to 32 to 40 with some rebate give and take if you even count those but generally to 30 to 40 and the gtx 960 two gigabyte ships closer to two hundred dollars so there is that model as well but as we just showed in our Assassin's Creed syndicate test the two gigabyte vs. 4 gigabyte models can actually have a pretty large performance disparity between them depending on what game you're playing and you can search our channel for more information on that for or just hit the Assassin's Creed syndicate article at the top of the website MD is pushing Direct X 12 support pretty hard because it is actually in some games like ashes of singularity which to be fair is a little bit and the favored by the developers in some games MV is showing a decent lead with DirectX 12 against Nvidia and that is largely due to the way their architecture is designed so that doesn't mean that there can't be an nvidia lead it just means that as of now in the very early stages of the x 12 with one or two games that exists with it there is somewhat of an advantage for AMD finally where it generally sees a disadvantage with its dx11 optimization and drivers and the architecture sort of struggling without a little bit of extra help so to the end of this dx12 support andy is very big on pushing the fact that as dx12 comes along cards like the r9 380 x are much better at tessellation than the older and the cards were and this is definitely worth noting because Andy does regularly get beat out in tessellation by n video which is pretty good at it that's why Nvidia does some of their technologies and game works with tessellation not necessarily to spite AMD I'm not saying that but because nvidia is good at tessellation they know that and they leverage it for things like hair works or some of their other effects that we've talked about in the past aside from tessellation Andy is also pushing the fact that the dynamic usage of vram for tiled resources like tiled textures particularly allows for a higher virtual resolution of texture files so you can get a general higher quality output in the game assuming the developers build for it because it doesn't matter what the GPU supports if developers don't build for it but the tiling is another feature that Andy is promoting as hey this is something that will work on the 380 x we're supporting it and we think we're good at it so that's kind of where they're coming at from a marketing angle and the other big items to look at are just going to be general performance and how does the TDP stack up against the previous cards which ran very hot if you remember the 200 series and things like that so we're going to look at all that now before diving into the FPS benchmarks a quick note that is important we are in the process of merging two of our GPU benches into one and that means that we have some z97 benchmarks that we conducted in some x99 the reason we're including both of them here unlike normally is because the x99 platform did have some newer games benched the including battlefront fallout and things like that so we wanted to include as many of those new games as possible and get the 380 x benched on those as well now when I had 380 the 390 and the fury X we had all those cards on loans so when you're looking at that data it is using older drivers the important note but for some of the games like metro and grid and those types of older games GTA even there haven't really been any driver optimization since launch the z97 and x 99 charts are pretty thoroughly explained on the website but i'll try and mention which one was used here in general you're still looking at a 960 versus 380 x benchmark there's some comparative 380 benchmarking if it was a game for which we had III 18 on X card let's first look at the thermal and power charts these were created using our z97 platform which has been running our thermal test for quite a while now and allows for comparison to the r9 380 398 fury x and many of the nvidia cards including the competing 960 and this shows thermal data first that the r9 380 x nitro which is the sapphire card using the sapphire cooler and all of that landed at roughly 53 celsius average delta T over ambient compared against the 45 c or so of the 380 nitro and both of these were nitro cards which is great because that means it is somewhat of a more linear comparison than cross brand cards the 380 does primarily host a lower clock of 10 10 megahertz versus the 1040 of the 380 x so that certainly contributes to the heat which you can see in our 380 OC benchmarks as well but if we look to power consumption that gives a bit of a look at the full peak system load on the z97 platform plus the 380 x so this is peak load whole system not just the GPU we see the 380 x consuming about 300 point 8 watts of power and that's about 40 watts more than the r9 380 about 30 watts more than the overclocked r9 380 and about 85 watts more pretty big than the gtx 960 GPU that we've tested and that's the most immediate contender the r9 390 sits at around 341 wats just for a comparison of something out a bit higher tier of a structure in the vertical getting to the FPS tests let's start with call of duty black ops 3 just because it's a newer title this test was conducted on our z97 platform but the r9 380 and r9 390 are not present here because they were on loan and we didn't have them for this test you'll see more of those in the following benchmarks in black ops 3 the r9 380 x performs at an admirable 66 FPS average those struggles a bit on the one percent and 0.1 percent lows the frame times as we call them the 66 FPS average plants the 380 x just under the gtx 960 4 gigabyte card and over the gtx 960 two gigabyte card though both 960 s do have superior one percent low metrics there's a bit of a gain for the 380 x on average over the 960 two gigabyte card the 9 64 gigabyte beats the r9 380 x by three percent with 380 x beating the 960 two gigabyte by also three percent so hopefully that's not too confusing if you just look at the table here moving on to the 1440p resolution black ops 3 tests the 380 x falls below the general playable range landing at 43 FPS average and with an 11 FPS 0.1% low certainly not great to get 1440p playable would require either tanking the settings pretty hard to a much lower configuration or just running a lower resolution really or a higher-end card with the 1440p resolution for the 380 x you're generally stuck at about 1080p at least in this game unless you want to crash your settings which isn't worth it in my opinion you're better off going to another card let's look at some charts that show the r9 380 and r9 390 for better vertical comparison these are on our z97 platform also the witcher 3 is still new and a GPU intensive games that makes for perfect comparison for an x benchmark and at 1080p with hair works disabled anti-aliasing completely disabled and ambient occlusion set to SSAO for fairness the 380 x lands at 38 FPS just above the r9 285 and r9 380 both of which are at 36 FPS that's a 2 FPS gap the gtx 960 cards both hit 34 FPS and are effectively identical to each other in performance and this has them beaten by the 380 x by about five point four percent at 1080p and we'd have to move to something more like medium or high for better playability granted because even at the frame rate we're at right now with the 380 x it's not great but for comparative and competitive reasons the 380 x is exceeding the 960 s performance by about 5 perform five point four percent excuse me with the Nvidia technologies disabled like hair works and things like that which would impact the performance of nvidia as well metro last light is a long-standing GPU benchmark and includes nearly all cards we've ever tested at 1080p with very high quality and high tessellation settings the 380 x pushes 58 FPS which is about a five percent gain over the 389 x and that means the 380 x holds as you see here about a 10 point nine percent lead over the gtx 960 tested at 1440p the next resolution as you can see here the 380 x can push about 40 FPS average and just barely lands above the r9 380 and r9 285 effectively identical cards again this is not really a great card for higher resolutions than 1080p but this is sort of where Andy is targeting the 380 x card it's the gaming sweet spot so to speak as everyone calls it these days at 1080p shadow of mordor puts the r9 380 x at about six point seven percent over the r9 380 a reasonable improvement and lands it just within the 60 FPS ideal performance range the 380 x is about 9% ahead of the 384 1440p performance so that is a reasonable gain or delta in the percentages but would require some settings tunings to get it more playable in the ideal 60 FPS range because it is a bit lower than that with 1440p let's look at something new Assassin's Creed syndicate doesn't include the 380 and 390 in our benchmarks but it does show some modern-day lineup performance of Nvidia and AMD GPUs in opposition with one another at 1080p with our ultra custom settings to find an hour separate Assassin's Creed syndicate benchmark video and article the r9 380 x pushes 54 FPS against the gtx 960 s 53 FPS and if we look at the 4 gigabyte 960 that's about a 1.8 percent gain so negligible against the 2 gigabyte 960 however there is a much bigger gap of about eighteen percent and that gap between the 2 960 s just strictly between them is sixteen percent and is in line with previous Assassin's Creed games which seems to accentuate the two gigabyte vs. 4 gigabyte mid-range GPU disparity so a much bigger gap there for more benchmarks including the new battlefront game grid GTA check gamers Nexus dotnet for additional charts and analysis looking at overclocking the r9 380 x is fairly easy to overclock and limited right now given that we didn't have proper voltage controls at launch here's a table showing our stepping of the overclocking over a test period so you can see our trial failure and successes with the clock rate and so forth we ended up with an 85 megahertz core clock offset yielding and 11 25 megahertz engine clock and 50 megahertz memory offset yielding a 1550 megahertz memory clock the power offset was maxed to twenty percent which provided stability throughout our short term and endurance tests with these finalized settings this means we can overclock only about seven percent on and these are 93 ATX or the sapphire version anyway which is pre overclocked and we see around a five to eight percent performance gain shown here in these overclock charts for the witcher 3 metro last light and shadow of mordor all of which have overclocked in non overclocks benchmarks shown in the charts this makes overclocking hardly worth it but that's been true since the previous 300 series launches for andy and really the fury x2 for that matter and the board partner cards are already pushing up against their stable limits with the architecture provided and the fury x which is all done by AMD basically is also against its limit so not a whole lot of room for overclocking right now alright so that's enough of that let's get into the conclusion here and talk about value the r9 380 x is priced effectively identically to the gtx 960 and depending on which 960 you're looking at and which game you're looking at like Assassin's Creed the disparity between the two gigabyte model and the 4 gigabyte 380 x is quite large and that's true for the four gig verse 2 Giga 960 is also one of the biggest performance gaps we saw was in GTA 5 which held about a 13-percent advantage for the 380 x over the four gigabyte 960 and we also saw a gain for the 380 axon metro last light about 10-ish percent for the 380 x 1st 2 960 as well and when you look at games like black ops you see that there is a bit of trade between the two cards 916 the 380 because the 4 gigabyte 960 has a couple FPS hold over the 380 x so they do trade blows depend on which game you're testing and that's pretty standard for cards of about this price range the 380 x is a fierce competitor at this price point it deals a hearty blow to nvidia's gtx 960 stronghold at its current 230 ish dollar price point of the four gigabyte range and that makes andy a worthwhile look when you're buying a card of about this price the 380 x does hold a pretty substantial lead in some games like GTA 5 where there's a 13-percent delta and in other games metro there's a good bit of a lead some games it's down to maybe five percent or even less one-point-eight percent in the case of a few of the titles we tested so ultimately as always depends on what game you're trying to play but I would feel comfortable recommending either the 960 or the 380 x at this point which is not something I've said of Andy in recent attempts in the past and that's been because of drivers so with the iteration of AMD's drivers over the past couple months the past five or so months in particular I have seen a lot of improved stability the team that is working at gamers Nexus has had a lot fewer problems with black screens and flickering and crashing and things like that so the drivers have gotten a lot more stable they've matured a lot and the new Radeon software is hopefully something that will continue and these software related efforts because it's not out yet but it does look like a step in the right direction for usability and sort of pushing users to the point where they can actually access the software with some level of certainty what they're doing rather than going through catalyst control center which although not bad is not the most friendly to some of the newer users and builders out there the gtx 960 s primary advantage as always it seems is in thermals and power draw so it draws significantly less power about 80 watts or so than the 380 x and that is something that nvidia has been good at for a long time now since the 400 series which was very hot and their thermals are solid as well so comes down to how much do you care about overclocking because the 960 will be better at the in general how much do you care about power draw because again 960 is a bit better but it does lag behind in some games thirteen percent GTA 5 and then you got to look at the overall value proposition with frame rate I would feel comfortable recommending both cards 380 x is a very good bye if you're a budget system builder or if you just don't care about things like the power draw because ultimately 80 watts maybe not so much for some people because you're looking at pennies ten cents or so per kilowatt hour but anyway 3dx it's a good buy I'd do it at the two hundred dollar twenty thirty dollar price point the 960 has some advantages primarily in software support and in its power thermals and stuff like that hit the post roll link for patreon if you like this type of objective journalistic coverage and as always subscribe comment things like that we really appreciate you watching share the word i'll see you all next time